April 23, 2017

The legendary comedy group Monty Python was once a force of nature, influencing everything that came after them with their surreal, absurdist approach to comedy. So, why don’t we hear from them anymore? When Graham Chapman ceased to be in 1989, fellow Python member Terry Jones described it as “the worst case of party-pooping [he’d] ever seen.” His death came the day before Python’s 20th anniversary, and what followed was a bizarre but fitting eulogy, written to pay tribute to the man who’d written a dead parrot into one of the troupe’s most famous sketches. Chapman becoming an ex-person seemed to put a damper on any kind of authentic reunion, but what about the others? What happened to the late, great Monty Python?

Brendan O’Neill on the mainstreaming of mental illness as a status marker for “respectable society”:

One of the great media myths of the 21st century is that there’s a taboo against talking about mental illness. Please. Then how come I can’t open a newspaper or flick through my TV channels or browse social media without seeing someone go into grisly depth, often replete with sad selfies, about his latest bout of mental darkness? Far from taboo, having a mental illness, and talking about your mental illness, is all the rage. It’s the latest must-have. You’re no one unless you’ve had a mental episode. And I find this transformation of mental illness into a fashion accessory far worse than the old treatment of it as a taboo (which was very bad).

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It’s dangerous firstly because it springs from and reinforces the weird 21st-century trend for actively inviting people to define themselves as mentally ill. Everything from exam stress to general anxiety to feeling up one day and down the next – which used to be called ‘moods’ but is now called ‘bipolar disorder’ – is being recategorised as a mental illness or disorder. Everyday emotions and experiences have been co-opted into the field of mental health. You think you’re shy? Nope, you have social anxiety disorder. Do you have an awkward friend? Maybe he has Asperger’s. Finding it hard to cope with your workload? Check out this Workplace Stress and Anxiety Disorder Survey to find out if really you are mentally ill.

Virtually all of life’s struggles and people’s personality quirks are being medicalised. And in some cases treated: Britain is said to be in the grip of a ‘psychiatric drug epidemic’, as the number of prescriptions for mental-health drugs rose by an astonishing 500 percent between 1992 and 2014. It’s like something out of Huxley’s Brave New World, in which people are given a mind drug that suppresses their ‘malice and bad tempers’. And people actively seek a diagnosis. A few years ago, a psychiatrist told the BBC that patients come to her saying, ‘I want to be bipolar’. She said the desire for a mental-illness diagnosis often reflects ‘a person’s aspiration for higher social status’. Yes, you can now boost your standing in respectable society by having a mental illness. This is how cool it has become to be mentally ill.

The dire impact of the must-have mental illness is most clear among the young. I can’t remember the last time I met a student who didn’t claim to have a mental illness of some kind. A few weeks of stress over their exams and they think they’re Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They post long social-media confessions of mental ill-health and everyone says ‘How brave’, overlooking that it’s really not brave to do something everyone else is doing; to say ‘I am mentally ill’ in a world in which you can’t swing a tote bag in Waterstone’s without hitting 20 books about being mentally ill. Everyone’s mentally ill; you aren’t special – you’re boring.

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs gets around to talking about the next flying car fantasy after first getting his knob squeezed (it’s not what you think) and then trying to do a bit of measurement:

A short while ago, at the end of another 45 minutes of relentless, sweaty knob-tweaking, one of my fellow gym members asked how many calories she could expect to burn at each class. Aha, I like a challenge, and so I decided to use my access to various wearable tech devices in order to find an answer to this question.

Well, I suppose it was a bright idea: the difficult bit was in implementing it.

Bound up by a host of bands and straps, I looked like a cross between a Running Man baddie and a punk reject hanging around Vivienne Westwood’s shop on the King’s Road in 1976. Yet I am tech gladiator incarnate, I told myself. I am Ali-Stor of Bromlar, son of Al-An, defiler of words, wearer of strap-ons, tweaker of knobs!

Maybe the developers of these fitness trackers thought it would be a good idea too. As it turns out, their implementation leaves a little to be desired. Every device measured and calculated my physical effort in a different way, producing wildly different results.

One heart-and-respiration monitor strapped across my chest reckoned I had burnt around 800 calories during the spin class. Another tracker reported a more modest 500 for the same session, with others suggesting various figures in between.

Best of all was my trusty Fitbit, which told me I’d been sitting down and doing nothing for those 45 minutes. No problem, I can simply use the app to log this period in my exercise record as a spin class and let its online database calculate a typical burn for the period.

172 calories.

Oh thanks a bunch, Fitbit. That’s the same as for a 20-minute stroll between my house and the local train station. Next time I consider attending a spin class, maybe I’ll go full-on and nip out to the newsagent instead. It’ll use up more calories and my tender knob can be left unsqueezed.

Forget what you see in the latest action movies or even video games, these gun myths shouldn’t be believed. We see it everywhere; James Bond, Westerns, Call of Duty, Fast and Furious, Terminator, Black Hawk Down, The Expendables, Goldeneye, Battlefield, Taken, Die Hard, Bon Cop Bad Cop, The Matrix, and so on – They’re all Bullshit, but we fall for them thanks to Hollywood. Here’s looking at you Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Can Bullets shoot through cars? Will gas canisters explode if you shoot them? Am I safe from bullets underwater? Those questions and more will be answered in this edition of Watchmojo’s Top 5 Myths.

Here is what conservatives do not understand — they did this. The hatred you see for cops in this country? It is all on them. They are the cause behind modern hatred of American police officers because while cops were taking kids on nickle rides and were beating suspects with hoses; were mistreating inner city blacks in a fashion conservative whites would never have allowed should it have occurred in their own neighborhoods; were torturing suspects and beating bartenders in Chicago; were shooting dogs to death for no reason and skating due to horrifying laws that shield them from any sort of consequence for their actions, those same conservatives were bowing and scraping and licking the boots of every police officer who happened to come walking by. Then, when one, random cop gets pistol whipped and claims that this was the fault of all who dared to criticize his profession, suddenly conservatives work themselves into a spittle inflected frenzy that they could not seem to manage when cops were doing far worse to their fellow citizens.

Where was the howling right-wing outrage when a cop beat a woman in a bar and his buddies tried to protect him from rightful consequences? Where was this conservative anger and angst when marines, those wonderful soldiers that conservatives adore so very much, were killed during ridiculous no-knock SWAT raids that, in a legitimately free society, never should have even been conducted?

They were nowhere — they did not say a word, they hardly cared. When black and Hispanics were provably tortured by the police, they hardly cared. When marines were killed, there was not a peep from the right and we had to rely on those evil anti-American progressives and libertarians to even discuss the matter.

And then they have the audacity to criticize me for daring to be too mean to the poor widdle boys and girls of our national constabulary. Well, respectfully, I don’t feel too bad about criticizing cops and attacking the unreasonable and often criminal actions of American police officers, and I will continue whether or not I have the permission of National Review or The Blaze or any other conservative media outlet. Maybe one day, if conservatives actually begin to care about the ‘small government’ ideals they’re constantly babbling about but never exercising, they’ll join me in my protest against illegitimate police activity. Until that day, though, I will continue to assume that conservatives are all talk and bluster and mindless blather, and that they don’t actually give a good Goddamn about any of the ideals they pretend to hold.